A memoir of growing up amid poverty in contemporary urban China—at once lyrical and brutal. It is 1980 and Hong Ying has turned 18. China is only now hesitantly beginning to move from under the powerful and dreadful shadow of the now dead Mao Zedong. Hong Ying is only now hesitantly beginning to reach adulthood, exploring her own mind, her sexuality, her past. Born in the famine year of 1962, Hong Ying’s determined to uncover the secrets that lie beneath the surface of her family, to understand why she feels like an outsider in their midst. At the same time she becomes involved with a history teacher at her high school who has his own shadowy and violent past that will soon lead him to a tragic end. He emboldens her to think for herself and also briefly becomes her lover. Throughout it all, the lives of Hong Ying and those around her are hopelessly enmeshed in the capricious and catastrophic policies of the Chinese Communist Party. The famine years of the early “60s, brought on by inept government policies, led her mother, Hong Ying learns, to make choices she would not otherwise have made. The factious struggles of the Cultural Revolution led the history teacher to commit acts of brutality very much against his nature. This is, then, the story of one person’s awakening, but also of a society’s. In its stark and detailed portrayal of unremitting poverty—the pervasive sense of hopelessness and casual violence—and of the stress and intimacies of family life, the work is reminiscent of Angela’s Ashes. Yet it is also very much a part of the great realist writing tradition of China’s “May 4th” movement of the 1930s (Lu Xun, Lao She, etc.) in which the greater tragedies of society are revealed in the ruined lives of a few characters. A major writer emerges here, combining flawlessly the often broken dreams of youth and the usually broken dream of politics. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1637-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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